MMORTS

[chaoslord]

Spring supports up to 250 players and 30k units, would a persistent MMORTS work? And is the player/unit limit per battleground of for the whole game server?

[Argh]

I can see people doing Diablo II - style stuff, that's definitely possible, from a technical standpoint, including persistence of stats (although keeping people from hacking their characters would be pretty darn futile unless an autohost held the only records that were actually used).

Is anybody actually working on something like that? Not that I know of.

Full-fledged MMO... not without some pretty major changes to how Spring works.

[MidKnight]

It is very difficult to write code to allow people to join while a game is in progress, as Spring is, in essence, a simulation, and has projectile physics and the like, and synchronizing that kind of stuff between a bunch of computers is very difficult unless all of those simulations started at the same time and developed in the same way.

This may not be totally accurate; an engine dev could probably shed more light on the matter.

Anyway, that, along with massive lag, are the biggest obstacles toward an MMORTS.

However, if you're just looking for persistent changes/upgrades, then that is a much more feasible goal. CA has something called PlanetWars, which,while it was running, had persistent, buyable player upgrades, and, if I remember correctly, lurker was working on sme neat technology that preserved map deformation state (craters, etc).

Lastly, I'm working, on and off, on an interesting Spring project, a component of which will be persistent player upgrades, items, and purchases. I'd be happy for some assistance, if you want to help out.

[chaoslord]

I was asking because I'm in the process of creating an MMORTS, currently in the conceptual stage with some art done, but no real coding done. All of the information is here. Considering the information above, would Spring work for it, and if not, would anybody know an engine that would?

[Argh]

Whee. OK, time to burst your bubble.

A RTS with hundreds of players, each having their own economy and dozens if not hundreds of units running around... is not technically feasible. It's not whether there's an engine, it's just not doable, short of dedicating a cluster to being the server.

Spring could act like a low-density MMO with instances and zones- if people aren't controlling giant armies then supporting 40+ players in a zone isn't unfeasible. IOW, Diablo II, but with a higher player cap, is certainly a feasible project on this engine.

But a RTS is a whole 'nother thing entirely. You could hack up a strategic "overworld" with RTS battles to determine what happens, absolutely yes- that's what PlanetWars was. But that's an entirely different animal from trying to have hundreds of people all running whole RTS armies around at once, all in the same game world. There aren't any engines that can do that, period, other than maybe some military simulators that aren't anything like a RTS in most ways.

[chaoslord]

Well, it was worth a try.
So, if this were to work, I'd have to have player caps in battlegrounds? So, maybe 20-30 per battle, and have multiple battles running?

[Argh]

20-30, if the armies were deliberately kept small via pop caps or other things, is doable. After all, people play 8v8 games on a regular basis. Not hundreds of units, though- maybe 3 dozen or so. A small StarCraft base and a rush force, basically, or maybe something like DoTA, where the players control a hero and the game controls the grunts.

[AF]

Nonsense.

This is not a matter of yes vs no in context of given computer hardware.

What we have here is a technical challenge, but one that can be done. IIRC MMORTS has already been done.

Do you have any material we can look over other than a facebook fanpage with 2 threads in the forum, and a flash website? (whole site in flash? major UI disaster)

[CarRepairer]

As Midknight said, planet wars sounds closest to what you want.

[SinbadEV]

If anyone ever comes up with a feasible way to make an MMORTS that isn't a "zoned matches" game but actually a persistent world with armies snaking their way about it... that would be all kinds of awesome... however the only way I see it being feasible is if it was running on super-clouds like OnLive is supposed to be. (Namely one huge world simulation that handles everything and users would simple be sending commands and receiving local rendering instructions or screenshots)

[Pxtl]

An MMORTS would suffer from a nasty problem anyways - I mean, RTSes are all about going from a single base to a massive unstoppable late-game army in a matter of minutes.

MMOs and RPGs went together naturally because the RPG progression and worlds and play-length were a the best fit for MMO worlds. An 80-hour CRPG in an endless world wasn't too hard to massage into an endless MMORPG. How do you convert a 1-hour match in a defined map to an endless world?

[CarRepairer]

That's why planetwars is the best happy-medium between MMO and RTS. There are "zoned matches" where the RTS happens where you interact with a few players at a time. But there is also interaction between all the players involved in the campaign when you go to the galaxy scale (website) and you can send motherships to enemy planets, send resources to allies, build persistent upgrades on your home planet which show up in the RTS part, and so on.

[Gota]

To make it actually fun it has to be done from ingame and automatically gather players.
The whole experience needs to be visually pleasing and engrossing and not just people gathering in the same lobby room...
Im not trying to disrespect the time spent by all the planet war devs,I am just saying what would cause me to want to play it.

[SinbadEV]

An MMORTS would suffer from a nasty problem anyways - I mean, RTSes are all about going from a single base to a massive unstoppable late-game army in a matter of minutes.

MMOs and RPGs went together naturally because the RPG progression and worlds and play-length were a the best fit for MMO worlds. An 80-hour CRPG in an endless world wasn't too hard to massage into an endless MMORPG. How do you convert a 1-hour match in a defined map to an endless world?

I have ideas:

Idea 1: TimeZones Each Hour gets a game, you sign in at this time to play, if you don't any commands you've cued up in your last session still happen etc so if you have a strong enough base there is a chance it will survive.

Idea 2: Clan Controlled Armies, an army is persistent for all clan members and as such would be controlled marathon style by multiple players.

Idea 3: Hero Commanders, commander drops into the game and starts building a base each session... but over time this commander will gain experience and access to new technology allowing his base to get teched up faster, perhaps even storing units pikmin style.

Idea 4: Porcfest, basically your job as a player is to build a base that is so strong that it's impenetrable... when it has survived for X number of days it's moved on to the next "zone", each players "base" would be the amount of territory they control and by penetrating other players bases they could expand into this additional territory and gain control of the resource sources on them... at the cost of now having to impenetrably protect a larger space...

Idea 5: Mobile bases, your entire base and infrastructure would be contained in your commander unit and you would spawn in neutral zones and then travel with your base to a place where you wish to deploy and fight for experience, new tech and resources... etc.

Idea 6: DirtBallz, each player controls a "planet" that pops into and out of existence when they log-in/out... this planet has their base on it and when they attack other NPC/player's planets they do so to steal a portion of the "mass" of their planet and their planet get's bigger and bigger supporting larger armies etc... but other players/NPC could attempt to land and entrench themselves on their planet to steal their mass.

[JohannesH]

idea 7: 120v120 dsd

[SinbadEV]

Idea 7: (actually a combination of the other ideas)

Start with an MMO world (think WOW or whatever) except your "avatar" is a huge mobile "city" and everything is smaller.

In open areas MOBs would be other cities, swarms of smaller monsters or city sized monsters... in order to avoid being ganked by these mobs you would need to deploy your city as a mobile Base or run back to a neutral zone... as your level increased your city may get automated defenses that would allow you to pass over weaker mobs without being threatened... your level, class, and skills from an MMO perspective would represent the buildings, units etc that you could deploy, there would be resource patches around the harvest from (TA style metal and gas vent perma-sources) which you, allied players or mobs could gain control of... after defeating a mob or running your base would go back to being a mobile city, all deployed stuctures/units could be reclaimed if you didn't run away up to your maximum resource storage capacity...

There would be instances like traditional MMORPGs where you would move through a sub-map fighting mobs (other players would protect your mobile base while it moved forward and you would be able to transfer control of your units to other players etc)... essencially moving forward towards a "boss fight"...

a "boss-fight" or PvP match would essencially be a traditional RTS campain skirmish or campain mission style fight.

[Pxtl]

I still think that, if I were doing an MMORTS (or even a planet-wars-like-game), I'd focus on having a portion of the "deployment" into the battlefield be factories, not units. Gives you a static position you have to defend, and lets you keep some of that RTS gameplay of growth going and in-game construction and unit-selection. Each player deploys a factory or two, a couple of heroes, and some immobile defenses to protect the factory, and that's all they get.

[SinbadEV]

sorry, when I say "units" I include factories, construction units, resource harvesters and static defenses (etc) and at least in the case of most of my ideas there would be either a "Base" or "Commander Unit" that would need to be protected and likely stay within the metaphorical confines of your "base"

[Pxtl]

I'd actually avoid having construction units in such a game. To me, it always breaks immersion even worse than the unit-factory - if you can plonk down factories and LLT's on the site, why isn't the region already developed? What happened to the last guy's LLTs and whatnot?

[SinbadEV]

I'd actually avoid having construction units in such a game. To me, it always breaks immersion even worse than the unit-factory - if you can plonk down factories and LLT's on the site, why isn't the region already developed? What happened to the last guy's LLTs and whatnot?

Toxic Atmosphear, Active Nano-Structures can only be maintained by a Super Computer that's as big as a city (your base) and otherwise decay... in this case you would need to deploy some kind of signal-repeaters... or maybe they stay there but without anyone to control them they stop working and are therfore easy for mobs to destroy/reclaim. It's Sci-Fi/Fantasy... you get to make up the rules to match game-play considerations.